Resilience of the Roman Empire

About this book

The Resilience of the Roman Empire' discusses the relationship between population and regional development in the Roman world from the perspective of archaeology. By adapting a comparative approach, the focus of the volume lies on exploring the various ways in which regional communities actively responded to population growth - or decline for that matter - in order to keep going on the land available to them. The theoretical framework - or at least the starting point - for the case studies is the agricultural intensification models developed by Thomas Malthus and Ester Boserup. In order to advance the debate on the validity of these models for identifying the societal and economic pathways of the Roman world, the contributors incorporate the concepts of resilience and diversity into their approach, and shift attention from the longue-durée to how people managed to sustain themselves over shorter periods of time. The aim of the volume is not to discard the theories of Malthus and Boserup, but rather to deconstruct overly strict Malthusian or Boserupian scenarios, and as such introduce novel and more layered ways of thinking by exploring resilience and variability in human responses to population growth/decline in the Roman world.